Honza's IT blog about Linux and open source software, where you can enjoy posts about databases, programming, scripting, Fedora and another geeky stuff.

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Few notes from pre-Fosdem CentOS Dojo 2017

As it is already a tradition, Friday before Fosdem there is a meet-up of CentOS folks in Brussels. This time it was funny because we were in the same venue as PgDay was held in. Anyway, it was again great to talk to people and see progress in CentOS ecosystem (I really cannot call it system any more).

How it was with CentOS and Red Hat

The day with two parallel trackes was started by Karanbir, the Mr. CentOS. He talked about recent history, when first talk with people from Red Hat happened, where they talked about joining forces for the first time. That gave a great insight at how the relation looks now, which I think was really important, since especially active contributors need to understand this unique relation.

And what the relation is? Obviously, CentOS wouldn't be here without RHEL, but on the other hand, RHEL benefits from CentOS, which is not a downstream any more. Many projects like Gluster, OpenStack or Software Collections provide place for wider community to develop tools that are simply not good fit for Fedora. We can call it upstream or just community projects, important is that it works.

Then he gave several numbers, when all guesses from audience were mostly wront (lower) -- since numbers about CentOS base image downloads (tens millions) or current size of the mirror (254GB from what 150GB is not upstream RHEL) is simply astonishing.

On the negative part of the present state, CentOS folks (the official guys paid by RH for working FT on CentOS) lack resources, people resources, but with big community it still works amazingly, thanks to collaboration.

Now, what next? It's good to understand, that CentOS still can make easier everything you need to do with CentOS -- may it be modularity related, OpenStack, or NodeJS related. What is for example happening is that NodeJS master branch is tested in CI CentOS to see whether it works correctly on CentOS.

Long term they want to have CI that is available for everybody in opensource, and generally focus beyond CentOS ecosystem.

What EL6 user should pay attention in EL7, CI and really big data in Cern

Next talk by Bert Van Vreckem was more targeted to users of el6, who recently moved or decided to move soon to el7. He presented several commands any admin should know about. Exploring his github repo I found also nice collection of articles about writing readable and kinda safe Bash scripts, so I recommend checking https://t.co/F1JkYaOMQV.

Brian Stinson, the main CentOS CI guy, shared some basic info about current CI abilities, while it's more than awesome that many open-source projects, even outside of CentOS ecosystem can levarage this cool thing . It's especially cool because we do not speak about VMs, but about bare metal machines, that one can connect to and get a unique testing infrastructure for free. For the future we might find more architectures -- currently there is quite big demand for ppc64le and 64bit arm, which seems to be the future of the cloud soon.

The last talk of that day I attended was by David Abdurachmanov from Cern, who shared crazy numbers from their practice. They need to process huge amount of data that are often created in less than a second. 350PB data on disk, 800PB carried over net, 650k intel cores or 300Gbps network, that is the reality that helps humans in exploring the smallest particles in the Universe.